Explore the Space section of The Pulse for science-driven coverage of astronomy, cosmic research and exploration missions.
A small, unremarkable rock pulled from the Sahara Desert in 2019 sits among the rarest objects on Earth. Of roughly 80,000 known meteorites, only 68 belong…
Some galaxies spend billions of years churning out stars at a relentless pace — then, almost abruptly, go quiet. Astronomers have watched this transition play out…
Something incredible has been hiding in Mars’s frozen deserts. It’s taken over 10 years for one robot to pick it up. But it took an engineering…
Tens of thousands of satellites now circle the Earth, beaming down internet and filling the night sky with moving points of light. And when one of…
Scrolling through routine MAVEN data one day in December 2023, researcher Christopher Fowler noticed something he couldn’t explain: strange “wiggles” in the spacecraft’s magnetic field readings…
At first, M88 appeared to be just another normal spiral galaxy. It was bright, had a lot of internal structure, and plenty of raw material for…
For nearly one hundred years, we’ve taken advantage of a great concept about the universe. At first glance, it appeared to cover everything. The theory looked…
Sifting through data from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers spotted something unexpected in the faint light of a young, forming star — frozen molecules that,…
Some of the best navigators on Earth don’t have GPS. They don’t even have much of a brain. One of them is a beetle. A dung…
We know light travels across the cosmos in straight lines – or so we think. There’s something unknown in our galaxy that is bending and distorting…
Every summer, coastal communities brace for an invisible threat. Harmful algal blooms can kill wildlife, shut down beaches, and send swimmers to the hospital — often…
On December 6, 2025, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft swung behind Mars on a routine orbital pass — and never came back. Mission controllers waited for the signal…
Astronomers have spent decades trying to understand what happens inside giant gas and dust clouds across the Milky Way. Their structure is constantly shifting over time.…
Can NASA actually succeed with its ambitious, multi-billion-dollar plan to colonize the Moon? The agency has proposed a complex schedule for returning to the lunar surface.…
Sixty-three million light-years away, a spiral galaxy called Messier 88 glitters with young star clusters and dark dust lanes, its arms arranged in a pattern so…
Gravitational wave detectors are now “hearing” the universe collide three to four times a week. On May 26, astronomers released GWTC-5 — a single catalog containing…
With less than 15 minutes before liftoff, SpaceX slipped an unexpected announcement into its live coverage of the Starship V3 launch attempt on May 21: a…
A large, glowing nebula sitting just 1.5 degrees from the Andromeda Galaxy had puzzled astronomers for years. Known as SDSO 1, it emitted a distinctive oxygen…
Hold a carbonaceous chondrite and you’re holding a piece of the solar system’s infancy — a fragment of rock that predates Earth, assembled from dust when…
Somewhere over the Mojave Desert, a needle-nosed aircraft with no front windshield is preparing to do something no experimental jet has attempted in decades: quietly shatter…
On a quiet Saturday afternoon, residents across eastern Massachusetts suddenly felt their windows rattle and their floors tremble. No storm was rolling in, no transformer had…
Is there another way a galaxy from eons ago could have grown differently than scientists expect? Recently, astronomers took a closer look at a peculiar object…
A detector buried under a mountain to catch dark matter has just been turned on something stranger: chameleons, hypothetical particles that some physicists believe carry the…
At 00:52 local time on May 19, 2026, a Vega-C rocket lit up the predawn sky above French Guiana and carried the Smile spacecraft into orbit.…
At the center of the Milky Way, something glows faintly in gamma rays — and nobody can agree on what it is. For years, scientists have…
Astronomers were expecting the Milky Way to simply fade off into space. They expected the outer disk to become thinner. They expected fewer births of new…
4.6 billion years ago, the young Solar System was a swirling chaos of gas and dust — and nothing about planet formation was guaranteed. Yet somehow,…
The search for alien life has mostly focused on water, oxygen, and distant Earth-like planets. Now another clue has entered the picture. Researchers say living systems…
Dark matter fills the universe. It outweighs all the stars, planets, and gas clouds combined, yet it passes through everything — planets, stars, your own body…
Imagine finishing outdoor work as the light fades, only to watch the sky brighten again — a second sun climbing the horizon where the first one…
Sandy mornings. Clear skies by sunset. It sounds like an ordinary weather forecast — except this one is for a world 690 light-years away, where the…
Far out in northern Lake Michigan sits an island many Americans have never heard of. Yet sailors remembered it for generations. Dense forests cover most of…
Neptune’s moon system is a study in chaos. Of the planet’s 16 known moons, most trace wildly irregular orbits, and a single moon — Triton —…
NASA’s spacecraft has just completed a major turning point in its deep-space journey. After several years of travel time, the spacecraft passed near Mars and used…
Superluminous supernovae are among the most violent events the universe produces — explosions that can outshine ordinary stellar deaths by a factor of 100. For nearly…
The crowd outside Ottawa’s National Arts Centre had been waiting for this. Kids in homemade astronaut costumes pressed forward, giant crew avatars lit up the outdoor…
The U.S. Space Force has formally launched a program to place missile-intercepting spacecraft in orbit — designed to shoot down hypersonic weapons mid-flight, something no country…
The sun isn’t sitting still. Right now, it’s carrying Earth, every other planet, and everything on them through space at roughly 140 miles per second —…
Late on April 27, 2026, an Expedition 74 crew member settled into the ISS cupola and trained a camera on the darkness below West Africa, watching…
Astronomers spent nearly six years searching for what they called a “cosmic ghost”. Late August 2025 is when the Zwicky Transient Facility in California caught it.…
The universe has a skeleton. Astronomers call it the cosmic web — a vast scaffolding of gas filaments, dark matter, and galaxy clusters that organizes everything…
The space industry’s vision is compelling: hundreds of thousands of satellites circling Earth, beaming internet to remote corners of the globe, running orbital data centers, harvesting…
Astronomers thought this cosmic firework would fade within days. Early data suggested it was just another kilonova. Then a shift in light emerged. When a second…
NASA scientists searching deep space images noticed something oddly familiar floating inside a dark cloud. A glowing hamburger. At least that’s what it looked like from…
On Friday, April 13, 2029, an asteroid roughly the size of the Empire State Building will pass closer to Earth than our own geostationary satellites —…
Venus may be volcanically alive right now — but from Earth, scientists have no way to confirm it. The clues needed to answer that question may…
For ten years, a team at UCLA pointed the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope at the sky and listened. The Green Bank Telescope, a 100-meter…
At first glance, it looks like noise — a smear of black and white pixels that could be anything. But those pixels contain four living people,…
Deep inside Antarctic snow less than twenty years old, scientists have found iron that could not have been made on Earth. It forms only in the…
Fifty years ago, this Alaskan site was a frozen spruce forest. Today, it is a 10-foot-deep lake. Today, things are rather different: the forest is gone.…
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